Crises
Eruptions
Anxieties
Stressful encounters
Document losses
House keys mislaid
Dents in the bumper
Disappointments
Rain on your parade
Promised phone calls never happening
No less than five political fundraising calls in a day
Netflix buffering for twenty minutes
The local food store is out of milk, tea and cereal
The boiling coffee pot has fallen on the kitchen floor
The only place you are safe is under the bedclothes.
A blood test that can detect signs of Alzheimers as much as 20 years before its onset has been developed. Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis in Missouri believe it is 94% accurate while being much cheaper and simpler than a brain scan.
The test measures levels of amyloid beta protein, a key indicator of Alzheimer’s, and combines it with analysis of age and genetic risk factors. Researchers say clumps of the protein begin to form in the brain up to two decades before the onset of the characteristic memory loss.
I have more than enough experience of memory loss, whether you technically call it Alzheimer’s, or the effect of early brain trauma owing to an accident. Whatever the technical term used, it is a horrible disease, both for the sufferer and for the family of the sick person. How does one maintain one’s calmness when, for instance, you are physically assaulted by your own mother (who has no idea what she was doing)? How do you remain calm, understanding and patient when your companion gets lost going to the local store, or even forgets who you are?
I really think alzheimers ( memory loss, call it what you will) is one of the great challenges to those who follow and support the ideas of Epicurus. In his day life expectancy was short compared with today. The problem surely existed, but must have been fairly rare. Now it is an epidemic, testing the ataraxia of the most loving of us all.
On the other hand, do you really want to know that you are going to lose your memory twenty years from now? I suggest: only if a cure is on the horizon!
Some US state motor vehicle bureaus have found an unacceptable new way of raising revenue. They are selling the information given to the government to get a driver’s license — your birthdate to your address etc — to third parties, including bail bond companies and private investigators.
We have a better idea for states looking to enhance the public purse: raise taxes on the wealthy! Higher tax levies on the wealthy don’t require any invasions of privacy and have an extra added benefit. They reduce the inequality that’s poisoning our future. (Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies Inequality. org)
The loss of personal privacy that has accompanied the wired society is dismaying. When the internet, and everything that goes with it, were introduced we all thought them exciting modern developments, full of promise. And they were and are. But why is is that a minority of people look at every innovation as an invitation to either enrich themselves or to use them for twisted, nefarious purposes? And why, when we desperately need to trust those who govern us, and for whom we vote, are we betrayed by people with no common sense?
My never-to-be Epicurean government would make personal privacy second only to doing something quick, decisive and effective about the climate crisis.
From the Washington Post
Much white evangelical support for President Trump is based on a bargain or transaction: political loyalty (and political cover for the president’s moral flaws) in return for protection from a hostile culture. Many evangelicals are fearful that courts and government regulators will increasingly treat their moral and religious convictions as varieties of bigotry. And that this will undermine the ability of religious institutions to maintain their identities and do their work. Such alarm is embedded within a larger anxiety about lost social standing that makes Trump’s promise of a return to “greatness” appealing.
Evangelical concerns may be exaggerated, but they are not imaginary. There are some political progressive who would grant institutional religious liberty only to churches, synagogues and mosques, not to religious schools, religious hospitals and religious charities. Such a cramped view of pluralism amounts to the establishment of secularism, which would undermine the long-standing cooperation of government and religious institutions in tasks such as treating addiction, placing children in adoptive homes, caring for the sick and educating the young.
But this is not, by any reasonable measure, the largest problem evangelicals face. It is, instead, the massive exit from evangelicalism among the young. About 26 percent of Americans 65 and older identify as white evangelical Protestants. Among those ages 18 to 29, the figure is 8 percent. Why this demographic abyss does not cause greater panic — panic concerning the existence of evangelicalism as a major force in the United States — is a mystery and a scandal. With their focus on repeal of the Johnson Amendment and the right to say “Merry Christmas,” some evangelical leaders are tidying up the kitchen while the house burns down around them. (Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 2019).
I think the answer is, maybe, that young people, regardless of religious outlook, tend to be less racist than the older generation, more tolerant of diversity, deeply concerned about the climate crisis, and also very concerned about their futures in the workplace, the short-term contracts and lack of pay increases over so many years, and so on. This doesn’t make all of them want to vote for Democrats, or to vote at all, but maybe they no longer share the attitude of their parents towards abortion, women’s rights, minority rights and the environment. It is also true that religiosity is declining, in the towns and cities at any rate. America cannot any longer be called a christian nation in any meaningful sense of the word; it started stopping being so a while ago, but its moral corruption gathers at a massive rate, unremarked by old evangelicals.
From The Guardian
Last year Mexico registered 35,964 murders, an increase of three times the previous year. Only a tiny fraction of crimes committed are solved, and increasingly ordinary people are taking the law into their own hands, specifically, 174 times last year, lynching suspects wherever they can find them. Citizens are frustrated by incompetent policing, a failing justice system, and increasing organised crime. It’s called “institutional abandonment” when the citizens feel they cannot rely on the authorities. How much the detection rate is influenced by corruption isn’t clear, but what is clear is the ordinary folk are totally fed up. (The Guardian, 30 Aug 2019)
Nearly 36,000 murders in a single year! It sounds like outright civil war, and yet we hear little about it, and no reasons are suggested for the massacre of so many people. One assumes it is an extension of what it is happening to the ofher countries in Central America: drug cartel violence, and the effects of climate change and the desperation this is starting to cause. If these are the main reasons then we have to look ahead to more bad news, year by year, and building walls is not going to insulate the US from the influx of desperate people – that’s just a cruel political gimmick.
